tax increases and spending cuts to that size, the cbo and others estimated that unemployment would rise and we very well might go back into a recession. so the challenge is to achieve long run sustainability without unduly hampering the recovery which we have. the deal that was struck, together with the previous work in 2011 that involved some spending cuts made some progress in both of these goals. on longer and sustainability, over the next decade or so, we have seen some movement toward stability in terms of the debt to gdp ratio. more work can be done, for sure. and then, on the short run, the fiscal cliff deal on new year's eliminated a good bit of the components of the fiscal policy that would have had such bad effects. not completely, but it was a good start. so there was a bit of progress on both of these goals. but i should hasten to say that we are not out of the woods because we are approaching a number of other fiscal critical watersheds coming up. we have the funding of the government, the so-called sequester, number of spending cuts that were laid as part of the fiscal cli